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Security Onion for Splunk 1.1.3 – IDS Rule Reference

I’ve been working a lot lately on tuning Security Onion alerts, specifically Snort alerts via en/disablesid.conf, threshold.conf and Sguil’s autocat.conf. (If you use Security Onion and don’t know what those are, go here now.) JJ Cummings’ PulledPork is an incredibly effective tool for updating Snort or Emerging Threat IDS rules and provides some very straightforward methods of controlling what rules are enabled or disabled in Snort. It does that job incredibly well, which is why it’s the tool of choice in Security Onion.

Where I ran into issues was in keeping track of it all. I had 6 terminal windows open: enablesid.conf, disablesid.conf, threshold.conf, autocat.conf, and windows to grep downloaded.rules and lookup the rule reference files. I also had Sguil and Snorby up as I like to keep Sguil focused on incidents and clean of false positives and let Snorby and Splunk provide the deeper visibility into less certain events, where I can get full Bro IDS context. Keeping track of what I had enabled in Snort, but not in Sguil and what was enabled versus disabled was maddening and my desktop was a mess.

There had to be an easier way…so I maddened myself the Splunk way during off hours to reduce the maddening during work hours. Hopefully the end result will help you maintain your sanity during the tuning process.

Just to be clear, what I’m about to describe in no way replaces what PulledPork does. It provides Splunk visibility to rule files created by PulledPork.

Version 1.1.3 introduces IDS Rules to the SOstat menu. By indexing PulledPork *.rules files and the Snort Rule Documentation – opensource.gz (Oinkcode required), this dashboard allows you to search Snort rules by Classtype, Category, Rule Source and/or Rule Status (enabled/disabled). You can quickly check, for example, what rules in the trojan-activity classtype are disabled. Drill down on a rule and you can view the rule, the Snort reference file (if the rule has one) and a timechart with a time picker to view the selected rule’s activity over time.

Needless to say, it’s made sorting through rules and rule data much more manageable.

Before I get to the eye candy, here’s some mind candy. You have to enable the Data Inputs in the Splunk GUI and I’m leaving it up to you in terms of how you want to index the data. If volume is a big concern for you, enable the Data Inputs and manually copy the files (extract the Rule Documentation) to the defined “monitor” folders. If you’ve got audit and tracking concerns, I provide a couple very simplistic scripts and script inputs to give you an idea how you can script the process to provide a running history of a rule and it’s status. If you’re hardcore tuning, you might even want to setup /etc/nsm/rules as the Data Input for real time monitoring. It’s really up to you. Just be mindful that it can chew up some indexing volume if you get carried away.

It’s going to need a little tuning of the dashboard view to handle real-time or daily monitoring and I’m working on filtering by sensor if you have various policies applied across a multi-sensor deployment. But in the words of @DougBurks, “release early and release often.”

Now the eye candy.

When you first load the dashboard you’ll see something like this:

The drop downs let you refine your searches:

You can also specify the rule file you’re targeting as well as whether you want to view all, enabled or disabled rules. Once you’ve made a drop down selection the rules window will populate:

Drilling down on a rule will display the rule, the reference file (if available for that sid) and a timechart with a time picker so you can quickly check on rule activity.Zooming in on the Rule Reference panel:

The event workflow for Snort Sguil events now looks like this:

Selecting *VRT – 498 will open a new Splunk search window to the rule reference file result. (I’m going to make this cleaner in future releases).

Quick Setup (for ad-hoc indexing)

Install/Upgrade the app. Enable the Data Inputs for ids_rules and ids_rules_doc sourcetypes in Splunk Manager.

If you use CLI, copy /opt/splunk/etc/apps/securityonion/default/inputs.conf to /opt/splunk/etc/apps/securityonion/local/inputs.conf and edit the /local copy. Making changes to the /local files will not be overwritten by app updates, whereas /default will.

Scroll to the bottom and look for the monitor stanza for sourcetype ids_rules and change disabled = 0 instead of 1.

Restart Splunk and give it a few to percolate. It will take a few minutes to index all the rule files so be patient. Edit /opt/splunk/etc/apps/securityonion/default/inputs.conf and disable the monitors. Then head on over to SOstat > IDS Rules and give it a spin. If you see a blue bar error at the top that reads “No matching fields exist” the files haven’t been indexed yet. You can do a search for “sourcetype=ids_rules” and/or “sourcetype=ids_rules_doc” to check on the indexing process or open the Search app from the Splunk menu and check the source types panel in the bottom left. Find the ids_rules* sourcetypes and when the count stops going up after more than a few minutes it’s done. Restart Splunk to reload the inputs.conf file and disable subsequent indexing.

I’m seriously debating releasing this as a PulledPork for Splunk app as well, so I would love feedback from either Security Onion users or Snort PulledPork users as to whether there is interest or need outside my own desire for order. But then again I’ll have some time on the flights to and from Vegas next week; it might be fitting for a PulledPork Splunk app to come into it’s own on an airplane, eh JJ?

Other notables in this release:

You may need to reenter your CIF api key in the workflow config if you’re using CIF.

The SOstat Security Onion and *nix dashboards now allow you to view details by all SO servers/sensors or by the individual hosts in a distributed deployment.

VRT lookup added to workflow for Sguil events with a sig_id. Not all sig_ids will have a Snort rule reference file (especially Emerging Threat rules), so mileage will vary.

I’m hopeful making the Snort rule reference files accessible will help move towards the ultimate goal of this app. All along I’ve had two end users in mind: a large scale deployment and the home user. Both can install Security Onion with little knowledge thanks to Doug’s efforts, but neither is assured to be able to take it to the next step without help or a lot of effort if the expertise isn’t there. Providing easy access to context, whether it’s Snort rule reference files or CIF queries, can make a huge difference. To that end, more updates will be coming with a Sguil mining dashboard that will provide correlated context around events (think IR search result type data as drill down results as you review Sguil events) and more Mining views for network based indicators.

I’ll be at BlackHat and DefCon next week so if any Security Onion or SO for Splunk users want to meet up, hit me up via email or the twitter (@bradshoop).